down official placards, making flamboyant speeches, or unfurling forbidden
flags. But in order to effect the former he would sometimes fight for his
freedom with startling energy, from which men were sometimes lucky to
escape with a broken head instead of a broken neck. His most famous feats of
escape, however, were due to dexterity and not to violence. On a cloudless
summer morning he had come down a country road white with dust, and,
pausing outside a farmhouse, had told the farmer's daughter, with elegant
indifference, that the local police were in pursuit of him. The girl's name was
Bridget Royce, a somber and even sullen type of beauty, and she looked at him
darkly, as if in doubt, and said, "Do you want me to hide you?" Upon which he
only laughed, leaped lightly over the stone wall, and strode toward the farm,
merely throwing over his shoulder the remark, "Thank you, I have generally
been quite capable of hiding myself." In which proceeding he acted with a
tragic ignorance of the nature of women; and there fell on his path in that
sunshine a shadow of doom.
While he disappeared through the farmhouse the girl remained for a few
moments looking up the road, and two perspiring policemen came plowing up
to the door where she stood. Though still angry, she was still silent, and a
quarter of an hour later the officers had searched the house and were already
inspecting the kitchen garden and cornfield behind it. In the ugly reaction of
her mood she might have been tempted even to point out the fugitive, but for a
small difficulty that she had no more notion than the policemen had of where
he could possibly have gone. The kitchen garden was inclosed by a very low
wall, and the cornfield beyond lay aslant like a square patch on a great green
hill on which he could still have been seen even as a dot in the distance.
Everything stood solid in its familiar place; the apple tree was too small to
support or hide a climber; the only shed stood open and obviously empty;
there was no sound save the droning of summer flies and the occasional flutter
of a bird unfamiliar enough to be surprised by the scarecrow in the field; there
was scarcely a shadow save a few blue lines that fell from the thin tree; every
detail was picked out by the brilliant day light as if in a microscope. The girl
described the scene later, with all the passionate realism of her race, and,
whether or no the policemen had a similar eye for the picturesque, they had at
least an eye for the facts of the case, and were compelled to give up the chase
and retire from the scene. Bridget Royce remained as if in a trance, staring at
the sunlit garden in which a man had just vanished like a fairy. She was still in
a sinister mood, and the miracle took in her mind a character of unfriendliness
and fear, as if the fairy were decidedly a bad fairy. The sun upon the glittering
garden depressed her more than the darkness, but she continued to stare at it.
Then the world itself went half-witted and she screamed. The scarecrow
moved in the sun light. It had stood with its back to her in a battered old black
hat and a tattered garment, and with all its tatters flying, it strode away across